In terms of preference, I find myself liking local specifically because it’s easier to maintain. I use Proton Drive for cloud storage, and maintaining it (uploading files, changing folder structures, renaming files, etc) is extremely annoying because it is slower than local maintenance and there’s less utilities in Proton Drive. But of course this is only because my cloud provider is slow.
In terms of what we should do, we should always have proper backups. and this necessarily implies cloud storage. Whether you use local or cloud storage, you always need another cloud backup somewhere for safety. Disaster can creep up any time any place and can destroy all that you have in an instant. Speaking of which, we should revive this post.
I like to pay more for external storage and keep my data locally. With all of the leaks and cloud storage surveillance I’d rather encrypt my photos and save them to a hard drive. If I want to watch them or use the drive, I simply plug it it. There is no way to hack it unless somebody broke into my home. Also I can organize my data more efficiently, and then use python scipts if I want to automate any process. It just works for me, but I get why people use EE2E cloud storage.
you need both for ultimate backup so you don’t find yourself one day with all your local backups burned or stolen. obviously, make sure to encrypt the backups.
Primarily local backup to my NAS using Syncthing. I’ve started to embrace cloud storage more recently, so I’m thinking about getting Proton Drive subscription as well.
SMB (Samba) server on my own hardware, remotely accessed with Wireguard. My server also runs Nextcloud, but I only use it for sharing files externally.